


Burned but not Buried

by bansheenanigans



Series: 1001 Bottles of Realm Reborn Red [4]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: A rotating cast of ffxiv npcs, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, I Have Opinions, Multiple Warriors of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Viera Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:21:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 15,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23741467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bansheenanigans/pseuds/bansheenanigans
Summary: More or less moments in the journey of Yldegarde Kolfrid, threefold warrior of light.(The other entries in this series have all the good relationships and romance, these are more of a prolonged character study? Will probably be edited for order when I write more, and this is by no means in linear order. )
Series: 1001 Bottles of Realm Reborn Red [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1608463
Kudos: 2





	1. Rules for Living

**Author's Note:**

> First chapter: Post-ARR, Pre-murder party/HW

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yldegarde grows, and learns, and changes...mostly for the better.

Yldegarde Kolfrid lives a life ruled by a few simple, constant rules, never-changing, never bent. She is Yldegarde, no shorter, no less. Nicknames are for pets and silly little girls, and she is a scientist and a mage, first and foremost. She will never be a pet or a silly girl again. Yldegarde, no exceptions. 

Except...that a scoundrel calls her Ylde, and she’s too scared to correct him the first time, hiding behind the counter of the bar that had become her shackle, from the pirates outside. And it sticks, and she is only upset the first few times, before it feels less like a collar and more like a gift. A lifeline, offered by someone who needed one himself. She holds onto Ylde, but only for the scoundrel. When they part, she is Yldegarde, she is strong and bent to none. No exceptions. 

Except...the scoundrel doesn’t stay gone, and after their reunion, when he brings home a tiny little spitfire who calls out “Ylde!” With glee, she accepts that, maybe, a nickname isn’t so bad. When she sits close to scoundrel, and spitfire, and feels at peace, almost at home, she thinks, this is softness enough. This is enough for her. This is the only rule that bends. 

She does not share space, this is for certain. She has earned the space she carves out. She hoards books and bottles and bones, research and knick-knacks and worn out portraits, in the room her company friends open to her. People with grand titles and incredibly stupid inside jokes and so much pain. They grant her a space to call her own, something she’s never had before, and she makes her rule steadfast. This space is hers, no visitors, no sharing, no exceptions. This is where she is alone, just the way she likes it. 

Except her scoundrel sleeps in trees and on sandy shores and borrowed couches more often than not. And though he wanders more than he stays, she finds herself dragging home a nice, fluffy futon from the market, clearing her clutter and pulling in a Maelstrom trunk, a set of chairs, a hoard of planters. He doesn’t stay there often, but he stays. She shares. And though his spitfire has his own abode, she doesn’t mind when she looks up from her research and writings to see the Miqo’te curled up in the futon, waiting for their scoundrel to wander on home. 

Yldegarde says no, she will not trust the ragged threads of her heart and mind to any. Loved ones must not shoulder her burdens, she’s made her mind up. When the dark curls in her lungs, she will hold it back herself, and that’s it on that. Relying on others is to open oneself up, and she has never been very good at that. It has never held much sweetness for her. 

Except...brave creature, kind friend, whose mask echoes her own behind horn and scale, she tells little things. Not enough to hurt, for she sees the burden on his own shoulders, the echo of an ache eternal. She knows the fate of heroes and monster-hunters and brave men. But he understands her, and she understands him, and a small bridge of trust forms there, for pain to pass along and lessen somewhat, behind the facade of foolish revelry and lavish antics. 

No more like me, she promises, before she meets the boy with a mind wound tighter than any clock. With so much potential it burns her eyes, so much restraint she wonders if it bruises him. No more like her, but he isn't like her, he's something new and bright and good, and she is so proud of him, so fearful as she tries to give him a kinder hand than she was ever offered. To let him choose in a way she never could.

She says no heroes, and she means it. She sees the writing on the wall and the flaws in the stars and she thinks, I will not suffer this to touch them. So she gathers her scoundrel and her spitfire close, her brothers in every way that mattered, her family dearest and nearest, and she promises. No heroes. No fates written large in blood and in tears. No fanfare and no trumpets and no banquet dinners. No gods and no monsters and no ends with love and life unraveled, unfulfilled. She prays for this, pleads with Nymeia to listen, to grant her this one thing. 

Nymeia listens to her. Nymeia laughs, and it is bitter and regretful and all too loud. Some rules can simply not be followed, after all.


	2. Invitations

“You’ve another missive from the Gridanian Conjurer’s guild, you know that?” Y’shtola extends the letter in it’s lovely cream envelope and golden wax out to Yldegarde as she sits at her table in the Stones sorting herbs for F’lhaminn. 

“Oh. That. Just toss it, they’ve sent a few invitations as of late, after they heard I was meddling with the arcanists. As if bothering Okko while she studies is the same as giving them the finger. They want me to come with an open mind, apparently. Sway me over.” She eyes it with derision before sighing and pointing with the clipped end of a leek to a clear bit of space on the table.

“Is this about the black magic? I’m sure that if they’re extending an invitation, they hardly mean to arrest you at this point.” Y’shtola smiles that odd, wise smile, the one that prickles at Ylde’s skin. The one that says she knows something, that she will find her answers. What did she call it to Khiiral once...? Oh. Right. Nosy. Inquisitive, if she’s being reasonable and not a brat, which she tries to be about her friends. 

“Oh, no, it’s not that, though I will admit I’m still sore and a bit suspicious of their overtures. It’s not personal, it’s just in the interest of my health.” Another wave of a stem, this time of a fresh rose, slowly being divested of its petals for an impending rose jam. 

“In the interest of your health? I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.” Y’shtola takes a seat across from Ylde then, the letter still clasped in her hands, a beautiful and shiny distraction. Ylde is used to Y’shtola’s appraisals, particularly as she occasionally receives them from Y’mhitra as well. The sisters share a look and an enthusiasm, certainly. 

“Well, conjury pulls from the aether of the earth and things around a person. Like saturating a cloth. If I do that, I run the risk of losing my marbles. It doesn’t seem like either a fair trade or the mark of a good healer to do that. So, no white magic for me. Very sad.” It’s phrased perfectly plainly, with no sugarcoating. She’s honest with Y’shtola, because she knows Y’shtola knows better. It’s just easier on them both if she’s honest. 

“You...what?” The mage looks confused and startled, and has leaned in precipitously over the table, one sleeve shifting a stack of cleaned onions. Ylde frowns, and teaches over to adjust the pile slightly before she answers. 

“You didn’t know?,” she blinks in surprise, and the corners of her eyes crinkle with the lazy smile she grants Y’shtola, “I suppose I forget that you don’t have much experience with my people. Some Viera are just very sensitive to the Mist, the Aether. There’s a reason we’re not known for being great sorcerers, but hunters and warriors. If we imbibe a bit too much of the land, it punishes us by taking our reason and restraint with it. I’m particularly sensitive, so I can really only pull from me. And as I am so carefully informed, doing that with white magic would kill me. So, it’s a safety issue.” 

“I...I have seen Viera conjurers, I am certain of this. Are you leading me to believe that they are practicing irresponsibly?” Y'shtola seems positively baffled, and alarmed, perhaps. And maybe that's fair. 

“They probably have lower sensitivity. It’s more common now than it used to be. Mist Madness is rarer now, almost extinct. And being unable to pull at all? Rarer still. Maybe they’re half. Or maybe they musts have excellent restraint, which I admit I envy.” She shrugs, and continues to pluck chamomile blossoms from the stem, setting them aside in neat piles. “There are ways, I’m just not blessed with those circumstances. If I were smart, perhaps I wouldn’t even be a mage. Unfortunately, I’m a genius, so here we are.” 

“Have you considered explaining this to the conjurers? Mayhaps then they would leave you be.” The Sharlayan scholar has emerged from her friend, curious and contemplative, as if a new research avenue has opened itself up. And perhaps it has. Yldegarde will simply not suffer to be the subject, is all. 

“And put my sisters under scrutiny?,” she tuts, and presses a sprig of saffron behind Y’shtola’s twitching ear, “You said it yourself. There are some Viera in the white. My own mother was a skilled healer, before she passed. If I tell them that their protege may just be blessed in ways I am not, they’ll take it as leave to treat the girls like ticking time bombs, even if it’s likely untrue. They hardly seem the kind, from my experience with them, to take such a risk. And I’ll not strip another of their talent just because I don’t have it. It’s easier if they just think I’m a stubborn hag.”

To her surprise, Y’shtola chuckles, and drops the letter to the pile of scraps. 

“Oh, you’re just too familiar sometimes.” The words aren't accusation, but something close. Categorizing, perhaps. Ylde has no idea what neat little box she's been placed into by the archon before her, and some part of her might well be happier not knowing.

“I’ll take that as a compliment. I think."


	3. Another Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yldegarde gets an unpleasant reminder of her youth, and a far better reminder of how her friends care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FFXIV: Who knows what you were doing or where you're from before ARR  
> Me: cool I'm gonna be sad then

“Oh, by the Navigator, is that my dear sweet Lily?” The voice rings out over the bustle of the Bismarck’s evening clientele, traced easily to a stumbling Roe sailor on the outskirts of the restaurant, bathed in the evening’s fading light and likely little else, ”Ass, girl, I haven’t seen ye in what, near on five summers? Still sweet as ever, I hope!”

The lumbering form nears Ylde’s table as she sits shock still, eyes fixed wide on the impending sailor. Her fellow patrons look at her with confusion and the interloper with disgust, stirring her to snap out of her frozen state and reply.

“You’ve the wrong rabbit, sir, there’s no one here by that name.” She manages, wrapping a hand tightly around the staff strung over the back of her chair. Lyngsath would normally ask patrons to disarm, she knew, but she was no regular patron. He could never deny his protege her whims. Not when she was choosing to dazzle his finer critics and demanding consumers in her sparse free time. Much too useful to restrict. Strange, how reputation works. 

“Oh, bollocks, girl, as if I’d ever forget a face like that!,” He slurs, and he’s reached the table now, slammed his meaty hands down and spilled her cup of tea down the tablecloth with a vicious green stain, “I didn’t reckon Miss Myrtle would ever let you out of her bouquet, but ‘course, the damn thing got burnt down in that pirate raid back in the day... I’d know those tits anywhere, girl. Oh Lil, I’ve missed you-“

“You’re unwelcome here, if you haven’t noticed.” Comes unbidden from behind the drunken sailor, a distractingly conversational tone that could truly only belong to one beloved friend. Lyrit looks tired around his eyes, and in them, something darker and more threatening. Pity, then, that the sailor had yet to catch the daggers being glared at his back. 

“Oh, shoo, Lil here and I have business! Buy your own, you filthy rotter!” 

She winces at the words, shrinking into her chair and glancing around to see the confused, mutating into judgmental looks of her fellow patrons. The sharp turn of Lyrit’s mouth is almost imperceptible. It’s enough. It’s a comfort. A cold one, perhaps, but a comfort.

“We have no business,” She manages through gritted teeth, “I’m not Lilium and you’ve not bought me or anything else here, and I doubt you could afford either. Leave the establishment posthaste or regret it.”

“Don’t you lie to me girl! I’ve half a mind-“

“You’re about to have half a leg if you don’t stop bothering my friend.” M’oe, at last returning from the airship landing with Khiiral in tow, about snarls. She knows he doesn’t look a threat, unless you saw him dressed down, covered in scars and scrapes and burns. He looks sweet, and young, and kind, and he is. All dressed for their dinner plans, a reunion after a month of busy work in Gridania. But his threats aren’t empty. He’s not the sort, if he threatened at all. She’s learned to admire that. 

“By which he means he’s going to snap your leg off at the knee.” Khiiral elaborates with a thickened sailor’s accent, looking quite unimpressed with the situation altogether. It’s only the slight tremor in his hand on the back of her chair that betrays his discomfort, surrounded by pirates, drawn into the open with the past.   
Finally, the Roe turns, near knocking over her entire table before she catches it, and takes in the sudden audience. 

Khiiral, confused and looking suspicious and annoyed, with M’oe’s unclenched hand still trailing in his, fire burning in those warm eyes. And Lyrit. Lyrit towering and Twelve-blessed and famous, and staring holes in the man’s face with almost no expression at all, but a sickeningly sharp lance leaning casually at his side. Enough to make a reasonable man run, much less a drunk one, the sight of her boys would be. 

“Oh, I see, you’ve gone and upped your clientele. Greedy little bitch,” he snorts, and waves a hand at her boys as if in dismissal, “Hardworker’s gil not good enough for you anymore, you’ve gone and picked up adventurer’s? Bloody shame. You and I both know you ain’t a high quality whore past the thrill of taming a be-“

She almost doesn’t catch M’oe’s quick, sharp kick to the back of the knee, well-practiced despite a lack of profession, knocking the Roe back into the table she struggles to steady, as her diminutively dense friend pins the man’s arm to his back. The sailor’s face is squashed into the soiled tablecloth in front of her, bewildered and suddenly sobered.

“Apologize and he might not break your nose.” Khiiral offers casually from his post behind her chair, long-fingered hand gripped tightly to it, steadying. He’s not a confrontational sort, not really, but he won’t let her falter. And he does seem to get a kick out of M’oe’s occasional shows of brute force. She pretends it’s not odd, the way they flirt sometimes.

“I ain’t apologizing to no uppity whore!” The sailor spits, and then shrieks as M’oe slams his face into the table. 

“Apologize and I will only lightly break everything else,” M’oe amends, not releasing his grip, “Ylde?"

Her nod is dull and unfocused, her eyes fixed on the Roe and his heavily bleeding nose. He wasn’t the worst person to ever touch her. Not even close. Nor is he the first face she’s remembered, seen again in her new life and had to try and forget. But his face, his voice, makes something burn in her gut all the same, a vicious sort of boiling blood and acrid disgust. 

“What is going on here?!” Roars Lyngsath over the clamor, and she barely hears him anyway, turning her head to look at her mentor with pained eyes, “Aw, hells, Yldegarde, your boys are ruining my tables.”

“Sorry, Lyng, I-“ She’s interrupted by the audible, sickening crack and subsequent moan from the sailor. 

“It’s our fault, sir, that this was not done quicker, and we’ll be taking out this trash immediately,” Lyrit offers with a calm nod, and Lyngsath pales, “Please accept my apologies, and I’ll pay in full.” 

“Of…of course not, Aibek, it was already on the house. Just get that rot out of here,” the chef amends, before casting a worried look at Ylde, “Why don’t you and yours come eat in the private dining room? You look like you’d prefer to avoid further attention, and anyway, the staff’ll want to show off for one of their own.”

She wants to say, ’that would be lovely, Lyngsath, thank you’. She wants to nod, and smile, and move. But she doesn’t, and she can’t. She barely stirs when Khiiral coaxes her out of the chair and into the kitchens, tucked away in a corner on the upper level. 

“I’m sorry you had to see that.” She manages, finally, barely audibly, to Khiiral as he observes her with concern.

“Guy must have been real drunk, right?,” He chuckles nervously, and Twig flits about his head in a tizzy, “And a little racist. Not all Viera look alike, y’know?”

“Both things true, but no, he…he wasn’t wrong. He recognized me.” She shrugs, and wraps her arms around herself protectively. Her elezen friend blinks, bright green eyes perplexed and almost, almost with a bit of recognition.

“But your name isn’t Li...Lily? Lilium? Even your brother calls you Yldegarde, and I didn’t think you had middle names.” 

“Because that’s my name. I am Yldegarde. But…for a little while, I…I wasn’t. Before you opted to hide from the pirates behind my counter, I was Lilium, Lily, Lil, because it sounded better than Yldegarde in a sales pitch, and I-”

His reply is cut off by the arrival of M’oe and Lyrit, looking none worse the wear for ousting the sailor. M’oe rolls his shoulders, as if stretching out an ache, rather than throwing off the stiffness of a minor brawl, but his face is brilliant and bright and kind, as always. 

“I ordered a few bottles. And cake.” Lyrit offers quietly as he takes a seat, leisurely leaning back against the stone walls.

“I got the kebabs! I know they won’t be quite like the ones you make at home, but I worked up a bit of an appetite just now!” M’oe smiles at her and reaches out to squeeze an elbow before he takes his own seat, flinging his legs over Khiiral’s. 

“I barely knew how to cook when I made you kebabs last, M’oe.” She chides softly, and tries for a smile that doesn’t quite meet her eyes. He waves her off, excitedly chattering about how homecooked always tasted better. 

Khiiral still looks...confused, and her next smile is the tiniest bit better in its sincerity. 

“Miss Myrtle kept her Bouquet, and I was the Lilium. A fancy name for a garden variety lily. I always thought it was a stupid shtick for a brothel, but it wasn’t really my choice in the first place, so...” 

“You never told me it was a brothel!” He blurts, and then blinks when M’oe pauses in his chattering to stare. Lyrit doesn’t, but she can see the shift in his posture, the sharp vertical line of his spine. A puzzle piece falling into place. Something finally making an unfortunate sort of sense.

“You...you didn’t know it was?” It’s her turn to be incredulous, looking at her oldest friend with open befuddlement. 

“I didn’t exactly read the signs to see what kind of counter I was jumping over,” he amends, and frowns, “You never told me, though. I knew you weren’t there by choice, but I...I guess I never wanted to think about it. You didn’t want me to, did you?”

She...shrugs, then, and tries to hold down the boiling feeling in her stomach. The years old anger and shame. 

“I assumed you knew, and...we didn’t talk about what you were, why would we talk about what I was? Neither of us had the choice in the matter, it was in the effort of survival. I don’t know why it would be such a betrayal.” 

“You didn’t look like a-“ he stops himself, and frowns at her again, stern but still bewildered. He’s not as angry at her as he has been before, but she can tell he’s still bothered.

“I was a relatively baby-faced 20-something, remember? And...off-duty, at the time we met. And anyway, Myrtle had...class, or whatever,” She shrugs, and curls her fists into the tablecloth, “Good business sense, more like. I was the pride of her collection and very good for business so making sure I still looked fresh and sweet was important.” 

“You said you worked there to repay a debt!” 

“I was. A debt to Myrtle. She took me in when I left the Golmore and promised a place to stay, food, time and space to learn how to be in the world, learn more of the common tongue. But you know that.”

“I...” He looks like he’s never quite thought of it. That the idea had never formally crossed his mind, but yet, the surprise is fading, and dots connecting in apple-green eyes. 

“It racked up quite the debt, and I didn’t understand that until it was too late.” She thinks of the young pirate captain who’d flirted with her over the counter as she worked the shop up front, blissfully ignorant. She thinks of how he took her to bed and she’d thought he was oh so kind, he’d pay her debts and sail her away, up until the moment he’d dropped the heavy bag of Gil on her mattress and said he’d expected a steeper price for breaking in a beast girl. The look on Myrtle’s face, cold and shrewd, when she’d wept on the older woman’s lap. The pitiless explanation that Yldegarde was never going to make back her debt unless she started really working...and what that meant. 

M’oe’s glass snaps, and it snaps her out of her memory, brings her all too aware to the wet feeling of her cheeks. 

“I was the gem of the Bouquet. Expensive. Garlean officers and foreign dignitaries, or...sailors who’d had enough luck to pretend they were masters of the sea. So it could have been worse. I could have had much worse. Doesn’t mean I’m particularly...proud of having been what I was. Like Khiiral’s not proud of being a...scoundrel.”   
She sees the widened eyes, the momentary look of barely contained fury in her friend’s face, and she rushes to fill the silence.

“And anyway! No one could dare take advantage of me now. Not with such good friends.” She smiles, and waves a hand dismissively in the air, as if the subject would drop with the gesture.

“Ylde, you can incinerate a fully grown man without getting up from your chair. We’re window dressing.” Is the politely teasing, testing response from M’oe.  
“But very pretty window dressing. The good kind, that keeps the light out and temperature controlled for libraries.” 

Lyrit seems to ponder this, the concept of being drapery rather than a tower of heroism and courage, for a moment, before simply shrugging and taking a drink from his glass, minding the shards of the broken one as he does. 

“You’re...a huge nerd,” He nods, and then smiles, lightly, just enough to register as a change of expression, “But I applaud the self-control it took not to catch the dining room on fire before we took care of it.” 

He doesn’t have to say what he really means by it. And it’s much kinder that way.

Khiiral holds his frown, clearly pondering the way he’d never looked closer. Never asked. She didn’t begrudge him that. She hadn’t wanted to tell. She puts a hand delicately on his forearm, musters all the warmth she can into her smile.

“We both got a rebirth that day, didn’t we? A second chance. Don’t worry about what came before it. I don’t.”

The smile he grants in return is slow, but nodding, understanding. Another piece of the past to tuck away, under mutual agreement. Another life, for them both.


	4. Apologies and Ginger Cookies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alphinaud and Yldegarde have an overdue conversation in Heavensward.

“Alphinaud, might we...might we talk?” Ylde manages to force the words as smoothly and softly out as she can, hanging in the doorway of his quarters at the Fortemps manse. He’d left the door open, presumably as he bustled in and out of the house searching out and receiving information for their cause, and seemed to have settled at the small but intricately carved desk within, scribbling away at a sheet of parchment. Her voice seems to startle him out of a thought, and he spins in his chair to face her, eyes wide. She grimaces, ready to apologize, when he smiles.

“Yldegarde! I wasn’t expecting you to visit. Of course, come in, come in!” He stands to clear a space in the mass of books and rolled parchments on the chair closest to his desk, and behind her hand, she stifles a chuckle. As refined and collected as he appeared, he still had some tendencies of a teenager. He was still so young...

“I don’t mean to intrude,” She offers as she crosses the richly embroidered rug to take a seat in the chair, carefully pulling a quill out of the cushions to place back on his desk, “I know you’re quite busy, and truly, I must thank you, without your efforts... well. You know.”

“I always have time for a friend.” He smiles back at her, though it seems overtired and somewhat strained, and he glances about his desk as if searching for something to offer as a snack, finding nothing. 

“I will profess, I am quite surprised you sought me out, you usually...seem quite busy.” He pulls off not sounding hurt quite well, but she can see the pull of his mouth. She can hear the unspoken ‘but you don’t consider me a friend, you avoid me like the plague’ In his tone. 

She smiles thinly, and pulls out a wrapped paper parcel, offering it out to him tentatively. He takes it with a curious look, and unwraps it to find a half dozen or so ginger cookies, freshly baked and still warm. 

“I’m shocked that the Fortemps staff allowed you in the kitchen, they’ve been so gracious and insistent on taking care of us while we’ve been here.” He takes a bite out of a cookie and can’t seem to contain the smile that breaks out. “I can’t even meander in to make myself a cup of tea without someone shooing me to a sitting room and bringing out a whole service. I’m not surprised Tataru favors the tavern to the mansion.” 

“Bold of you to assume that anyone could stop me from storming any kitchen in Eorzea to make a snack, Alphinaud.” She smiles tentatively back, and folds her hands into her lap nervously. Getting to the point is usually her strong suit, but that was in regards to lectures on creatures and aether, not particularly...social. Not delicate. 

“My thanks, Yldegarde, these are delicious, as always.” He nods, and seems loathe to pack the treats back up, but does. Always needing to be proper, that boy. She wouldn’t have minded if he ate the whole bundle in one go. “What did you need to talk about? Has something happened?”

“No, no, nothing has happened, I...,” She slumps her shoulders forward somewhat, working the words through her throat before they leave her mouth with some difficulty, “I wanted to...I wanted to apologize to you.”

This seems to take him aback, and he stares at her with confusion evident on his youthful face. 

“Apologize to me? For what?” 

She grimaces, and tucks a lock of hair over her shoulder, just to have something to do with her hands for a moment. Of course he would ask why. Anyone would. She was prepared to explain, wasn’t she, when she walked to his room. So why is it so hard now? 

“I...I need to apologize, for how I have been towards you. Our acquaintance has not been what it should have, and the fault lies with myself. I should have been a better companion, and instead I let my own faults color our time. And now, you have suffered so much alone, and I cannot forgive myself for not being there for you. Not truly.”

He stares at her with shock and confusion, clearly not sure what to say to her. He’s always been much better with words, but she’s hit a nerve, she thinks, and the knowledge is uneasy. 

“I...should have been kinder to you. From the beginning, really, but I didn’t see you. Not for yourself. I was much too busy seeing a ghost that I had mistakenly believed at rest, and when it seemed I would be haunted again, I held it against you for being the trigger. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right, and if I could turn back the hands of time and change my demeanor, I would. But I cannot, and so, I must apologize now, and hope you can forgive me. Though I do not blame you if you do not.” 

His expression doesn’t change, not really, but he straightens up, seems to try and make himself taller in his chair. It doesn’t help, of course. He’s still a child, with a long life of growing before him. She’ll tower over him, even sitting, for years yet. 

“I’m a bit...confused,” he admits, with a wondering sort of tone, “What do you mean, you saw a ghost? And what does that have to do with me?” 

She chuckles, a little, and it’s darker than she wishes it was. Her hands curl into her thick skirt on her lap, trying to hold some sort of grip. 

“You’re...you’re the same age I was, when I thought I could save my world. I met you, and I saw myself, and I hated it. I hated you. Genius, but...arrogant, certain, but too much talk. A dreamer who was not ready for a nightmare. But it was never you, nor your fault, and I was cruel without reason, cold and distant and...” she can’t look at him while she says it, turns her gaze solidly towards the floor. 

“You wouldn’t know, because I never...told anyone, at least, not the Scions, but I didn’t come to Eorzea to be an adventurer or a hero. I came to save my home, a village in the Golmore. I had grand ideas, and so much...hope, and I didn’t listen to anyone else. I lost everything, and I lost my home, I lost years of my life, and I never faced that."

“So when I met you, impressive and determined as you were, I...I just saw the child I had been. And how dare you, how dare I, think that... that I could change centuries of tradition, that I could change my world so much as to save it...” she catches herself there, and brings her attention back in time to see the hurt flash across his face. It pains her to see, to know she caused it. She did not want to hurt him. She wanted to fix what she’d done, how she’d been, and to do that, he had to...know the injustice she had held him to. 

“But you aren’t me. And holding you to the guilt and regret I have been burying for all these years is not fair. I don’t want to do it anymore, and I don’t want to pretend I never did, either. You have faced so much, these past moons, so much more than you should have had to face alone, and I was not there for you as I should have been. We both lost our friends, both betrayed by those we thought safe. Both experienced a horror quite unjust. And I left you to deal with it by yourself, because I was blinded to anyone else. I am sorry, Alphinaud. Nothing I can say can make that any better, I know.” 

She thinks she’s mistaken, for a moment, when she sees the tremble of his lip, but when his eyes are suddenly too bright, she sees her folly. It is too much to take in on top of everything, she knew that, but she still... 

She rises from her chair to wrap the young elezen into a tight hug as he seems to shake in her grasp. He is so small, still, all frail bird bones and gangly limbs. She can hold him so easily. 

“I knew you hated me,” He mumbles into her shoulder, and she feels her own eyes sting with tears of greater regret, “I could tell, but I thought I hadn’t proven myself to you, that you just...thought I was a child. That I wasn’t doing enough.” 

“You are a child, and that has never been and never will be a sin,” she soothes, and pats his back along with her words like she once did with the kits in her village, when they were afraid or hurt, like she tries for Orrick when he pulls away, like she tries so much more now, “But you did not need to prove yourself to me. I needed to see you as you are, and nothing you did could have hurried that. And I have, now, that the ghosts have cleared enough to see. I am so sorry you struggled when you did not have to, to clear my blindness. You’re an incredible young man, Alphinaud. I am in awe of what you accomplish. You’re brave, and kind, and this world has not been fair to you.” 

He doesn’t respond to that, but he does meet her hug, arms wrapping around her back tightly. She doesn’t know when someone hugged him last. She doesn’t know if he knows. She has no idea what his parents are like, or where they are, if they’re even alive. And it has been quite a long time since she has even seen his sister, and how awful that must feel, to be so far from someone who has been at your side all your life... it chokes at her, just a bit, and she sniffs back at the tears threatening to fall from her eyes. 

“I am so sorry for how I have treated you. For everything. But I promise, if you would allow me, I will do my best to be here for you from now forward. We do not need to suffer alone. I will not leave you with ghosts if I can help it.” She doesn’t disengage from their hug, as he maintains his grip, but softens her own, smoothing his hair back. Her shoulder is damp where he cries, but she doesn’t mind it. Tears will dry. And, she thinks, he needed to cry where someone could console him, just a little bit. 

She won’t let him become like her, she promises herself that. Even if he denies her, even if he can’t forgive her, she...she can’t let him become like her. Regretful and cold and ever-haunted. There were enough of those people in the world, and not enough dreamers with the will to make a difference, with the will to take on the world’s problems alone. Even if they did not need to be alone. Even if they weren’t really alone. 

She lets go of her ghosts, and promises to chase off his, if it’s all she can ever do.


	5. Losing Grip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Vault took no prisoners.

Yldegarde’s palms are raw with the friction of smashing her staff down, over, over again, into the draconic creature at her feet. It had snapped in two some point after she’d failed to pull more aether from her lungs, trapped and raw and...powerless. It is a priceless relic, something she is so, so proud to own, and yet. And yet. It’s broken, in her hands, and she hasn’t given it a second glance. The ragged ends had made for clever improvisation, certainly, but left her hands bloody and raw. Torn open with warped metal, brittle and pocked from quick temperature changes, splintering in the wooden core and an unfamiliar grip. The sound the longer end makes as she pulls it from the corpse, just one of many that had found her presence in the ruin offensive and made it glaringly known, is sickeningly squishing in her ears, against the roar of her blood pounding. Her mind is empty as an overturned coffer, no hum of constant thought, no wit, no investigative spirit. Empty and cold. Unfamiliar territory, but safe. So much safer than the alternative. 

“Ylde?”

She doesn’t register right away when the hand touches her arm, but when it makes to pull her to face its owner she lashes out with her broken staff, nearly catching the figure in the throat with the splintered end. 

“Don’t touch me!” Her voice is shrill and breaks on the final notes, choked off as if the air itself had revoked her privileges. 

Lyrit holds her back with ease, broken staff grabbed by gauntleted hands. His eyes, widened so slightly, betray a sort of concern she’d rather never see, a recognition that scalds. She shrinks back, dropping the staff pieces to clatter on the stones. Useless. Broken. What an odd sort of reflection. 

If it hadn’t been Lyrit, she could have killed someone. If it hadn’t been Lyrit, if he hadn’t been quick, she would have been a monster. She already feels like one, just knowing. 

It’s only when he wordlessly hands her a skin of water that she notices the overwhelming copper taste in her mouth, feels the caked and drying blood running down her chin. The unspoken question, is it hers, or something else’s, lingers in the air between them. She’s not sure. Gulping down clear water makes her nauseous, and it spills down her front, making everything...sticky. She tears at an edge of her coat and scrubs at the mess of her throat with the scrap, almost frantic.

“You aren’t supposed to...why are you here? No one knew where I was going.” 

He gives her an eyebrow raise that suggests that she was a fool to ever assume that her friends couldn’t find her, even if she ran to the ends of the earth. As it were, she’d only run to the ruins of the Churning Mists. She wasn’t sure why, exactly. It felt holy, in a way that only places that held not people, but ancient scars, could. A place before the teeth of loss had sunk in. She can’t rewind time to then, but...but she could... it hadn’t mattered. It was just where she went. She’d ran away from the living that could not give her what the dead had taken. 

“Did you bring them? They can’t see me like this.” She rasps at Lyrit, abandoning the shredded, sullied scrap to pull another and scrape harder at the mess. Her eyes frantically scan the shadows of the ruin, finding nothing. No figures. No all too loving eyes turned to pity. No outreaching hands. No chosen, hard-won family to disappoint. 

“Anyx Trine.” He nods back at her, understanding still coloring the frown on his face. His posture says enough, says that he had to make her boys stay behind, had to make the judgment call. He goes rummaging in some unseen pocket, finding nothing of use to offer her in her frenzied scrubbing. His hands gesture in apology, and she shrugs dully. 

“It’s my blood.” She manages, with another drink. “I think. Most of it. Maybe.”

“There’s a lot of it happening.” He observes with no particular inflection. He’s not pushing. She’s rather grateful he’s found her first, honestly, as difficult as it is. If anyone must find her like this, well, at least...at least it’s Lyrit. Who has yet to judge her for her choices, for her pain. Not yet. She hopes she doesn’t give him reason to. She’s sure she will, now. The thought aches.

“Yeah,” she sighs, and swishes the water in her mouth to clear the blood from her teeth before spitting it out on the dirty ground, “it happens, sometimes, when I...when I’ve pulled so much that there’s nothing left to pull. I get...hazy. It’s not healing, so it’s not...it’s not permanent, but... Alternatives must be made. Fair trades to the dark.”

She’s shaky on her feet when she moves to find a place to sit, and finds herself falling before she knows it, caught easily in Lyrit’s hands and steadied once more. He leads her over to a bit of rubble, makes sure she settles without risk of toppling, before leaning on something himself. 

“I’ll be fine in a bit. When it comes back. I just can’t let...I can’t let Khiiral and M’oe see me like this. You know what they’re like. Khiiral will panic, and try too hard to change the subject, distract, and M’oe...M’oe will have no place to put the fire.” 

“How often is sometimes?” She hears dully through the pounding of her head. She’s sunk it between her knees, trying to keep balance, to breathe solidly. She feels the ghost of a hand on her back, trying not to press in with clawed fingers. Her veins feel wrung out, slithering snakes in her flesh. It feels fair. Cruel, empty, fair. 

“Not what you’re thinking,” she mumbles around the dead weight of her tongue, “I don’t dredge that far, and I’m not...I don’t have a death wish.”

There’s a silence, and she feels it. The doubt. The hand too solid on her spine. 

The tears fall easily, splashing on the ground, tinged red where they run through the flaking blood of her chin. 

“I don’t have a death wish. Too much I have to do, that I promised to do, and my...my boys. I can’t hurt them, you, like that. I have to follow through, I just need...I just needed...” 

“You’ve been gone for a while now.” Lyrit speaks with unexpected solemnity, and kneels next to her to lend a bit more support to her slump. 

“I couldn’t be in Ishgard, and home was...was..,” she sniffs, and rubs at her mouth with a force that almost hurts, “I don’t want this. I don’t want this anymore. I don’t want to be me, when being me is...when I...”

“Haurchefant wasn’t your fault, Ylde. He chose-“

“I couldn’t save him, Lyrit!” She shrieks it, pulls away from his grasp to stand shakily on her own, “I couldn’t save him because all I’m good for is destruction, for ruin, for... for death! He laid there dying, dying for me, because he loved me. Because he believed in me. Believed in Ishgard, in what I asked him to believe in. And what did his faith bring him?”

Her laugh is cold and hoarse and cracking with electricity, barely flickering. It’s coming back in gasping stutters of breath, painful and burning. She feels half-wild, hands clenched into bloody fists. 

“I couldn’t save him then, but. But I could save him now...I could bring him back, I’m smarter than Edda ever was. I’m more powerful. I could build him back from bone and flesh and blood stolen spilled spelled and crafted and pull him from the Mist, but it...it wouldn’t be him, and...he wouldn’t want me to. He’d be horrified that I crossed that line, just to have him back safe in my arms. To invalidate his sacrifice and make him unholy. He would not love me anymore, and I would not blame him!”   
She’s sobbing by the last of her words, arms curled around her ribs for some form of solidity. 

“I couldn’t save him, and in his last moments, he asked me to smile. I can’t keep smiling. I can’t make myself, it feels so hollow and so wrong that I’d sooner pull my own teeth. What kind of monster am I, that I cannot do the last thing the man I loved asked of me? That I cannot honor him with one thing?” 

She laughs, a bitter barking sound, and rakes the hair back from her face with a shaking hand. Her voice is slipping into the hysterical, a high, razor-sharp edge on every syllable. Lyrit hasn’t moved, hasn’t changed, just watches her as she sways, a hunter to the last, watching a wounded animal chew at its own leg to be free of a trap. He lets her say every horrible thing she couldn’t bear to say to Khiiral, be angry in a way she couldn’t be to M’oe. He lets her dash herself against the rocks. Doesn’t stop her, doesn’t interrupt. And with every horrible thing, the desire to follow through on them fades. The desperation turns to quiet despair, to hollow hunger and exhaustion. 

“I thought...I thought I’d cracked it. The trick. To this wretched nightmare. To being a hero, a defender, a Warrior of Light, whatever. If I deny it just enough, give it enough respect, I...I could have one thing. I could have love, too. But I can’t. And I know why. I’m no bringer of Light! I’m a monster with a pretty face! Eorzea is better off with you, and with my boys, with all of you as heroes. I’m just a bad memory waiting in the wings...” 

“You’re giving up?” He sounds...he sounds angry with her, and it’s enough to make her blink around her tears, stare at him with slack mouth. 

“What?” She whispers.

His eyes are too bright and his mouth is a hard line and she can see every rigid line of his posture, coiled like a snake, see it ripple with something. Something awful, dark and deep and familiar. 

“Are you telling me you’re just going to give up, Ylde?” He asks again, and she can see, maybe, why people are afraid of her friend sometimes. She isn’t, yet. But she can see it. Knows that without knowing, without secrets, this would terrify a troop into motion. Set armies across a field in strident confidence. Send enemies running.   
She shivers at the scalding sensation of his eyes burning into her. 

“No, I’m not...I’m not giving up, I’m still here, aren’t I? I’m still here, I’m still breathing, i will come back and finish this, for him, I’m-“

“You’re poisoning yourself.” Softer now, if that’s possible, even perceptible. The coil of the snake is fading, replaced by weariness, by familiarity. 

She can’t meet his eyes. Her fingernails dig into her forearms, the pain of them holding her in place. Her self-imposed punishment laid bare, as clear as the blood on her face. 

“I love him so much, Lyrit.” She whispers, and feels the tears turn to ice on her cheeks as it all floods back to her system. “I was so happy. So stupidly, selfishly happy, I thought of futures, of impossible dreams. I can’t stop loving him, even though he’s gone. I can’t yet. I have to feel empty to even breathe. I have to remember that I didn’t deserve him in the first place, and go back to the way things were without him.” 

He looks like he wants to say something, to disagree with her, be angry, but instead he nods, and holds out a hand, seeming to relax only barely when she takes it and consents to sit again, to catch her breath. 

“I’m not going to ask you to smile,” he says simply, and the softened posture and gentle nod speak volumes to the acceptance, the question answered, “Come home and finish it. For him.” 

“What if I can’t?,” she whispers into her knees, hands tangling uselessly around her calves, “What if I fail him again?” 

“Then I’ll do it. But I think...” he doesn’t seem to know how to phrase the next part of his sentence, words failing. He’s not good at this. She knows he isn’t. He’s probably struggling to even manage, and somehow that makes the fact it’s him that found her all the worse and all the better all at once. He’s as good with emotions as she is. So what a pair they make, in the rubble, trying and failing to make something fade enough to be useful again. To make pain into something usable. A house specialty, but they’ve forgotten the recipe. 

“I think you have to finish it, for you. It doesn’t make it go away. But it helps.” 

“Does it?”

“Not always. And not quickly. But...yes.” 

“...take me home, please. But let me clean up first.”


	6. Violent Ends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zenos falls, and the world doesn't shatter quite yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someday I want to write more Stormblood-centric things, but I whipped through it, unfortunately, so we jump around a lot.

It becomes...increasingly obvious as celebration and tending goes on that the pull will not end.  
That it calls, sick and sweet and cloying, drags her from the celebration and the checking in, back up the Menagerie. Yldegarde presses a kiss to Khiiral and M’oe’s foreheads as she passes them, aiding in the healing efforts, something she can’t provide, and there is so much bustle, so much hooting and hollering and singing, that it’s easy enough to slip away. The clouds are rolling, threatening their downpour as she reaches the top of the palace again, and a part of that is welcome. It would wash away the blood. It would clear away the burn of it all. Nourish the land, ease the scar, clear the pavement...the rain was good. She’d always liked a good storm, anyway. The prickle of electricity under her fingertips, the cool rush of relief.

Her chakrams hang strangely heavy at her hips, unused to their weight as she still is. They were never going to feel as comfortable as a staff slung across her back. Never quite as comforting, as secure. No, in her deepest shreds of soul, she was a storm cloud, a destructive force, churning, unmoving. That she had brought blade of any sort against that monster was out of desperation. 

Out of hope.

Out of knowing. 

If she had tried to fight him with just her own magic, with just her own soul and fury, the resentment, the sickness, she likely would have killed herself. Drained every last bit of her aether and stabbed it into his heart, fireandiceandlightningandrot, no distinctions, no feeling, get it over with. Be freed from the ichor. The thick, syrupy, drowning feeling that had started the moment she’d met him, the monster, and only gotten worse as time wore on. And she could not bear to let her loved ones, her other pieces, see her fall like that, choking her own life out with vitriol while they fought alongside her. The switch-up had been...in the pursuit of control. Keeping it, white-knuckled and screaming, under control. It had been about being alive. And she was so alive, her boys were alive, her friends were alive, and he...he…

The body of the thing that called itself Zenos was yet in the gardens, untouched, unmoved. He was not the priority, not over those who yet lived. He was a monster in the flowers, blood staining the lighter petals, blending with the darker in a garish, sumptuous display. A sight for nightmares, for dreams yet to begin their haunting. The sight of him...the sight of him is simply cold. The rage has fled, the disgust faded, and he is just a body. An empty carcass, waiting to rot. Waiting for the vultures. Carrion, in the end, as all hunters were. Returned to the endlessness of eternity. 

Even those who heard him speak, who heard him say what he said, only one would know what that truly Did, to leave her with that ichor and rage and disgust. Khiiral knew, but M’oe didn’t, their companions didn’t. They didn’t know the way it summoned up something vile in her that she’d long since assumed dead. Her rage was justified because Zenos was a monster. Her rage was justified because Ala Mhigo deserved to be free. Because he hurt her friends. Those were all true things. Easy things. No one questioned her desire to see him fall. 

And why would they? It was expected of she and hers. A linked trio, tired and wanting, set against the evils of the world. A collective shield, with friends better suited to being the sword Eorzea so needed. 

To Zenos, they, she, had been beasts braying for blood, ripe for taking and toying. Amusements. Mirrors set in glaring scarlet. Not a person, none of them a person, as he was not a person, but something dark and starving and desperate for any sort of feeling that wasn’t emptiness.

She had been that empty once...protective, careful empty. Practiced empty, the hard papery cocoon around her anger, her resentment. She had been a thing to be tamed, an exemplary creature for consumption, nothing more. She had known the hollow call for anything, anything to fill it. She had not been bred for it, molded for it, but she had known it. Better than most. Better than she wished she did. 

When she had been the prize of Madam Myrtle's collection, when she had been Lilium, because Lilium sold better, sounded better than Yldegarde, bought and paid for. When she had been Lilium, she had seen her share of Garleans, so close to imperial territory borders. Some played at being kind, some were cruel and degrading from the start, but they had all played the game. She had emptied out her head and her heart and been the exact plaything they wanted, the shell, the beast of a girl. Tamed and in her place. Wild and easily subdued. She had been a primitive amusement. A toy. A creature to be conquered and held down and kept. Sailors were rough, but they could be kind if they had the mind, and they’d never shamed her. Merchants were strange, appraising and calculating their bargain each time. But Garleans knew. They knew they barely held her people with their grip on Dalmasca and the Golmore. They knew that her people were proud and capable of driving back their forces the moment they entered the forest. That the forest of the Viera was one place that they’d not truly dominated. 

But she had not been in the forests then, surrounded by her sisters and mothers and elders. She had been alone. And alone, it was so easy to be cruel. To be imperial. To know that no one would stop you. As it was easier to be empty. 

She had been...she had been. She was no longer. She had escaped that life, hand in hand with a scoundrel who became friend, who became family, who became unfortunate companion in their cruel fate. Who brought her to love and to feel loved, to lose, to know. She had learned to fill the emptiness with something other than hunger and rage. She had felt something real long before her final moments, whenever those would be. She had been, and now she simply...wasn’t. 

The rain drenches, torrential and cold, and she stands still, and she looks on that beautiful, horrible, soulless face, and she remembers. 

It has been so long since she remembered Lilium. So long since she had felt the ghosts of that poor, dead, stupid girl’s fingers under her own, the shaking spine, the weak knees and dead eyes. It has been so long since she’s felt anything near as helpless as Lilium did, as she Was, then. But he had risen Lilium from her grave with barely a care. Without knowing. Without caring, because Lilium was a better plaything, even without knowing her name. He had gripped that helplessness in two hands and wrested it to the surface. All in the interest of creating something for himself. For his own pleasure. To not be alone. 

Bastard. Monster. Grave robber. Familiar, familiar, familiar…

“I am not her. I am not empty. I am not like you, and I will never...I will never be like you, I promise that. You’re carrion, just like she is. You’re just another end.” She isn’t sure why she says it. Why she feels the need to try and prove a dead man wrong, when it would never change anything. It wasn’t like he could hear her. It wasn’t like it mattered. She was the only one who needed to hear it. Who needed it, like the ground needed the rain, like the sky needed to crack open with lightning and howl. 

She wonders, stomach churning as she stands in the Menagerie, what it would have been like to be what he saw her as. To be so empty again, and this time carved out in violence, in hate and obsession. To be Lilium in her final, fleeting moments, claws and teeth and hollow desperation. Hungry. 

What it would have been like to rip open his throat with her teeth and drink in deep, like he had nearly Asked. 

Lilium is dead, and Zenos is dead, and Yldegarde is so, so alive that it aches in her bones, in the bruising of her elbows and knees and the soreness of her shoulders, the twin scars across her face and her back. It is time to be alive, then. Isn’t it? It was past the time to be alive. 

So she rejoins the living, and she smiles with sharper teeth and eyes that hold another spark.


	7. Call and Response

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A gentle moment between friends before life once again turns to shit

“What is that you’re humming, Ylde?” Lyrit’s voice serves to startle her half out of her skin, focused as she is.   
She’s been chipping away at this particular dissertation of the voidsent for some time now, and failing miserably to collect her thoughts and findings in any matter that seemed clear. She didn’t begrudge M’oe and Khiiral their brief honeymoon, but the lack of sounding board and assistance was…making the process quite slow-going. She was never as good at writing down her enthusiastic research than she was at simply rattling it at the nearest companion. Orrick didn't share her particular fascination with the creatures, despite all his wit, and had nodded off in the pile of pillows and blankets in front of the fireplace upstairs hours ago, unlikely to be roused until nightfall. And Sitara and Neev were good apprentices, but terrible at providing constructive feedback. She’d sent them off to assist Lalai in translations hours ago instead of breathing down her neck, but now all she had was scraps to show for her blessed silence. 

“Oh it’s...it’s a hunting song. It’s meant to relax you, so you focus on what you’re doing and don’t...I’m sorry, was I being too loud?” She rambles before catching herself, swallowing down the explanation with a flush and a frown. She hadn’t intended to disturb Lyrit, though perhaps if she meant not to, she shouldn’t have been doing her writing in his house in the rare timeframe he was actually home. Alas, it was one of the quieter places she had to retreat to, and he never did Mind, before, since he never was home...

“How does it go?” Her usually stoic friend seems to light up at the prospect, crouching down beside her at one of the low tables to inspect her veritable snowdrift of crumpled notes before eyeing her with a cocked eyebrow and slightly gentler smirk. 

“You really want to know?” She’s taken aback by the concept, really. But perhaps the distraction is what she needs, even if unexpected. 

The look on his face is firm but kind, one arched eyebrow and the slightest tilt of his head. 

“There are...there’s words, of course, but they’re in Viera. I don’t think it’s ever been translated, though I could try, after…after providing the original, I suppose.” 

The expression on his face is fervent and sincere, warm smile curled onto his lips as he settles down beside her, clearing a space in her messy surroundings. She’s not used to this, this...softness. He has ever been a good friend, has listened to her more often than almost anyone, understood her far too well, but...actually seeing him enthused and chatty was somewhat alarming. How terrible was that? She had to relish the opportunity, grasp it with both hands before he returned to his usual aloof state. 

“Ahem, ah… ...” She half-sings the words, half-mumbles them, slightly uncomfortable with the sudden change in what is asked of her, and much out of practice.

The Xaela’s face is taken up by wonder, clearly hanging on the foreign phrasing and the half-hearted notes she does sing. At her pause, he offers his own absurdly confident rendition, before looking back at her expectantly for clarification. 

“Oh, no, it’s like…like this.” She demonstrates the note, louder and clearer this time, though her throat is unused to the action anymore. He sings the note back at her, and while it is…beautiful, his voice is beautiful, it still isn’t right. She frowns, and taps the end of her quill against the table listlessly, standing abruptly, stretching her back and awkwardly sighing before taking a better breath, and singing the entire line in full, eyes closing with the sound. It’s been a very long time since she has, rather than simply hum it, but she remembers, clear as ever. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you actually sing. You even sound sweet.” Calls Lyrit from his seat at the pillows, eyes wide and grinning. His teasing tone still comes off kind, which makes it all the worse. The grin seems to fade slightly when he catches her face, pensive and frowning. 

“I haven’t in a long time,” She shrugs, before shuffling her feet slightly in the scraps of parchment, “I…I don’t know if that even helps. If I translate it, it’s…it’s not as good. It would need substitutions. And you don’t know enough Viera to understand it otherwise.”

“You could teach me. You’ve taught enough that I caught the end. Very grim,” he seems briefly almost startled by his enthusiasm, “Only if you’d want to.”

She…thinks on that, staring at her friend, before steadying herself, quietly singing the first verse, and then motioning for him to follow after her, repeat it. He does, and his pronunciation only trips once or twice. It seems he’s better at another language when it’s sung, rather than spoken, curious as it is. She continues, singing the next verse before signaling for him to echo it, swaying slightly as she stands there. The song continues, and it reaches the point of familiarity, almost, as she calls and he responds, clearly enthused to try and wrap his tongue around the unfamiliar. She’s never heard her words quite this way, and it is...decidedly odd, but kind. Good, even. When the song ends, and she’s still standing, swaying, she claps, gently, works a smile onto her face as best as she can.

“It’s…it’s nice to hear it again. Thank you.”

“Are there more?” He asks, and truly it’s the most she’s ever heard her friend’s voice in a row, which she rather enjoys. She snorts.

“No, Lyrit, an entire culture that has existed for ages only has one song, and it’s the one every child learns by the time they can speak,” she waves a hand, and sighs, “I…I don’t know every song, but I know quite a few. But if I’m going to teach you them, we’ve got to work on your pronunciation. And probably adapt a few, they’re not…they’re not meant for men to sing, you know? Not for your register.”

The hand he waves suggests that the challenge she presents is nothing compared to the payoff. 

“But that was good. You only butchered a few words, but you kept them in time, so that’s good. Seems you’re quite the savant when it comes to learning songs, even in another language.”

The frown on his face suggests he’s trying to figure out which words he misspoke, before she shrugs and sits back down, pulls one of her scratched out parchments over and flips it to a blank side. Puts quill to paper, and motions for him to scoot closer amongst her discarded work. 

“You see, you pronounced with the wrong stress on the syllables, so instead you said, basically...May spear and arrow eat shoes.”  
The laugh he gives is hearty, and she smiles, scribbling down the lines of the song in their common tongue as best as she can.

“If you...if you help me translate them a little less literally, adjust as needed, then I’ll teach you them in common and in viera. And maybe you can put them into Xaela, hm? Though maybe that’s a bit too ambitious...”

He seems to brighten exponentially at the prospect, before catching a glimpse of her myriad crumpled parchments again. That damnable eyebrow goes up, a sort of gentle judgment as equal as a question. 

“It’s not getting done anyway, so this isn’t interrupting. And like I said, it...it’s nice to hear it sung again. It would be nice to have someone else know them, and you’re uniquely qualified.”

He snorts at that, and she rolls her eyes. 

“Come on now, how horrible would it be to bond with me about something that isn’t our shared bad habits and penchant for tragic circumstance, hm? Let me take the moment to be nice for once.”

This seems to placate her friend, who proceeds to sweep the veritable snowdrift aside with one arm and the mild assistance of his tail, before propping his elbows up on the table and batting eyelashes back at her. The display serves purpose, as always, despite being aggressively cheeky. It shows readiness, and agreement. 

“Wonderful,” she smiles, and pulls out yet more parchment from her overstuffed bag, “Let’s begin with the hunting songs. I think they’re most your speed...”


	8. Waiting Games

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Scion and friend start to fall empty, Ylde clings to the ones she has left.

“...Did I ever tell you, that I’m a twin too?” Is what Ylde blurts instead of her better, more rational thoughts, the soothing words, the confidence. It startles them both with the unexpected. Alisaie gapes at her, the shadow of grief briefly shooed away before it returns. But the girl’s gaze is curious, the mark of the intelligent scholar she was, even if not the same caliber, nay, style, of her brother. 

“I don’t think it ever came up, no. So, you have a sister?” Is the earnest, harried sort of reply. The worry is overcoming, Ylde knows that. But she wants...she wants to help. To grant the child some sort of respite. And she doesn’t know how, but...

“Yes and no. I did, once. Rosalind, who died so young. But, no, I have a twin brother. Like you. Honestly, when I met you properly, after knowing Alphinaud for a spell, I was...I was almost homesick.”

Blue eyes look questioning, thoughtful and confused at once. Where this comes from. What purpose this serves. When her brother lies empty in a bed, surrounded by their friends. When the hour ticks closer to disaster, to fear, the unknown. 

She tries to provide it. 

“His name is Valerian. I haven’t seen him, since...since we were younger than you, really. Viera have all these rules about boys...but that’s not...that’s not what this is about.”

“What is this about? I’m not angry you’re telling me, but my brother is...he’s...we’ve got much too much to do.” The temper flares, and by the gods, Ylde is glad for it, if it isn’t the despair and the rasp of tears that haven’t yet fallen. Anything is better than watching that pain in the face of a child she quietly, nearly considered close as her own flesh and blood. She knows that ache, that fear, closer than anything. She knows, and she hates to see it echoed on the face of someone so young. 

“I can’t go home, and I can’t go see my brother, wherever he is within. What I have of him is memory and guesswork, what do I look like, what would he look like, just...imagined futility to anyone else. But,” she holds out a hand, delicately grasping the young elezen’s in her own, “I know he’s out there, because I know that if he wasn’t, I would feel it. I know that one day, I will see him again. When you think of your brother, what do you feel? Not what you see. Not what you fear. But what you feel.”

“I feel...I feel like it wouldn’t end like this. That it can’t. I’m not done reminding him of his embarrassments, not done telling him not to be reckless, not done...all of it. I’m not done!” the words stretch tight before they snap, before the girl seems to crumple inwards, and Ylde rushes to wrap her arms around the small form that shakes in her grasp. 

“Then he’s not gone,” she soothes into the girl’s hair, trying to rub soothing circles into her shoulders, “You’d know. We’ll find him, and drag him back here, and he’ll have to answer for worrying us so. Isn’t that right?”

The laugh she gets is choked with tears, but it is a laugh. 

“Cry all you need, dear. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere without you. And when we go, we’ll find him together. We’ll find them all, and bring them home, because I would suffer it no other way, and you’re just as stubborn as I am, if not worse, which I admire quite a bit, you know.”


	9. A Hand Offered

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meeting Minfilia stirs up some feelings for Ylde

“Hello, little dove.” She whispers in a conspiratorial tone, crouching down and brushing her skirts out to peer into the young girl’s face, wide-eyed and mystified. They are shielded from the eyes of pixie and companion alike by the grasses and flowers, and with her tasks completed already, Ylde was much too compelled to seize the moment. To see for herself, this new Oracle, this not-Minfilia. A legacy of a friend lost, but also, certainly something altogether different. The curiosity is too much of a buzz to ignore. 

“Hello?” Comes the squeak of barely more than a child’s voice, as the girl clutches her hands to her chest. 

“Are you alright, dear? That was quite a scare, and I am dearly sorry that our meeting had to be such a way. And now this, of course,” she offers a hand gently to the lass, to...Minfilia but not. The strange reflection of a girl seems hesitant in taking the hand, but does, and they settle amongst the flowers. Ylde presses a finger to her own lips, smiling, as she sees their companions wander past unknowing on their various chores.

“I’m...fine. I’m fine. I’m sorry to have troubled you.” Her voice is so small, so gentle, that it stirs some small bit of ache in Ylde’s heart. 

“You certainly didn’t. And I am glad to have this moment to speak to you, especially after you risked so much to meet us.” She soothes, and moves to brush a bit of dirt and dust from the girl’s cheek. Those ever-blue eyes widen ever larger, almost impossibly. 

“This must be quite...quite difficult for you. But please know that I am full glad to meet you. I hope we can be...friends, e’er this is over, and if you ever...if you ever need anything, please let me know.” It’s a very...careful gesture. Testing the waters of what she suspects. Offering a lifeline she thinks might be all too needed. 

“Why are you...I’m sorry?” Minfilia (but not) looks near to fainting, eyes so wide and childlike and unsure that it reverberates, aches in Yldegarde’s lungs. There’s only so much she knows, but there’s enough burden in the girl’s face that it’s enough to guess. 

“This is a hard fate to hold, even with a dozen hands that so rarely do we have. And while I know Thancred is...competent in many regards, I also know he gets quite prickly when pressed, and he is pressed horrifically thin,” she tries very hard not to grimace as she speaks, to betray her growing ire with her once and maybe still love, “So, you may count my hands among your number. And my boys too, of course. Ne’er you mind them, they are fierce as they are kind.”

It takes some considerable restraint to downplay how Furious she is with the man she loves right now, how hurt and irritated with his behavior towards the poor girl before her. How much she wonders if she can still bear him, if he will break her heart after all, a stranger she no longer knows. But she does it, for both their benefits. No use in spoiling a first meeting with her frustrations at her lover. 

Minifilia looks...amazed, and somewhat baffled by the comforting words. And strangely like something else is trapped behind her teeth, trying to be said, before pixie and companions both interrupt their moment.

And when the moment returns, the taste of ashes and the boiling of fire in her gut is so strong and so terrible she could just...but she doesn’t. For the sake of them all, she doesn’t roast him figuratively or literally where he stands, doesn’t gather this new Minfilia and her dear twins and Orrick, too old and too jaded now, in her arms tight and careful and loving and flip him the proverbial bird. 

She knows his heart well enough, she would think, or she once did. She hopes that this is simply poor handling. That he is not such a player in a world of ever-harsher childhoods. She’s not sure she could love him through that.

But this girl, this child, who needs and who yearns and who aches, she could love. She could care for. 

The way Yldegarde’s life has long turned, she may never be a mother proper, but her cursed existence has well served to provide her plenty of charges. Plenty of opportunities to become like Y’shtola’s old master, become a Matoya, a crone in a cavern who mourns the young things that she tended for so long. 

It wouldn’t be so bad of a life, she thinks, watching the four young things she cares for amongst fields of flowers and pixies and beasts. It wouldn’t be such a terrible way to spend her centuries, assuming she was allowed to have them. 

The goal then, as always, was simply to make sure there was enough of a future for all of them. And she was ever-dedicated to such things as the promises she made in silence.


	10. Lost Chances

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Regrets last a very, very long time.

“Can...can you do my hair like yours?” Minfilia blurts from the doorway, and then looks sheepish.

“Like mine?” Ylde turns back to look at the young girl with interest. She’d stopped by to make sure Ylde had rested after their latest venture, she’d said, and had brought along some treat to share while Thancred was busy elsewhere in the Crystarium. 

A lonely child, attempting to be less so, and Ylde was never one to turn those sorts away. 

“It’s so...fancy. And it looks like it takes a long time, and I don’t...I don’t want to go back to my room yet. Is that okay?” The words are almost too fast, but carefully laid out, waiting for a dismissal instead. 

“It’s perfectly okay. I’m sure Thancred won’t mind so long as you’re with me, anyhow.” She shrugs, as she really doesn’t care if he minds or not, particularly. She likes the young girl she tries not to call 'Minfilia'. Ylde laughs, lightly, before beckoning the girl closer, bidding her out of the doorway and into her quarters. 

Minfilia leaves the door slightly ajar, and Ylde doesn’t mind, enjoying the soft hum of the city beyond. Instead, she shuffles towards the open window balcony and settles into the cushions she’s piled there, holding out one hand to beckon and using the other to pat the cushion in front of her. Minfilia follows almost silently, delicately placing herself on the cushion and resting her hands on her knees in front of her. Obedient, and dearly solid. Ylde frowns, slightly, before reaching out to pull golden hair forward. 

Minfilia almost shivers at the touch, and Ylde feels a burning pit in her stomach, thinking of Eulmore. Of captivity. Of a child who deserved better. 

The girl’s hair is fine and soft, and would be a challenge to pull into anything as elaborate as Ylde’s own tangled braids, but she pulls her small box of pins and trinkets close anyway, slipping a few cloudy gray ribbons from it and laying them across her own crossed legs. 

She winds strands intently for a moment, humming low under her breath, when she feels Minfilia fidget again, and lets out a small laugh.

“Is something the matter, Filia?” 

“No! Yes. No.” Quick succession, each word more awkward than the last, until finally the girl’s shoulders slump.

“I wanted to...I wanted to ask you something.” Minfilia offers quietly. The uncertainty in her voice is hard to ignore.

“Is that so? Well. We will be here a while, you know. And I like the sound of my own voice near as much as Urianger likes his. What is it you want to know, dear one?” Ylde’s laugh is raspy and kind, and she means every word. She remembers when Alphinaud and Alisaie were as anxious asking her questions, after all. Children were so funny like that. And so often it was just better to agree, and to nurture their confidence in asking. 

“I was wondering if you could...,” she starts, and then steels her spine, sounding more sure, “I was wondering if you could tell me more about Minfilia? Thancred’s Minfilia. I know the stories, but I don’t know...her.”

The question catches Ylde off guard, somewhat, and she drops the braid she was starting, watches it smoothly return to straight silk. 

“I don’t know if I’m...if I’m the best to ask about her?” She says slowly, carefully.

“No one else will really tell me what she was like. But you were close with her. You knew her. And you said you’d help me, so I thought...I thought I’d ask you.” That confidence wavers only slightly, as the girl’s shoulders hunch. Ylde sighs. 

“I wasn’t actually...close, with our Minfilia. With his Minfilia. Not really. I wanted to be, but...no,” she shakes her head with a sigh, raking a hand through her own hair roughly, “I didn’t want to be close to her. That’s a lie, and you deserve better.”

“Thancred...Thancred said you were friends. That Minfilia considered you her friend.” Minfilia looks confused, and a little worried, like somehow she’d get in trouble for saying as much. In return, Ylde reaches around, clasps the girl’s hands in her own, musters up a smile that could rival the best of actors. She did learn from the best, after all. 

“I’m sure he did. And maybe she did. I think maybe now, I could have been a better friend to her. But in truth...I didn’t know her long enough. To be a friend, a real friend. The last time I saw Minfilia as only herself, I...” she stutters her last words, as the nauseating aura of a too-vivid memory shivers in her head. The dark of the tunnels, the fear in Minfilia Warde’s face, the way she had said no, so forcefully and so strong, but not enough... 

“Are you alright, Ylde?” Minfilia’s voice is worried through the fog of the headache that is settling, and The small, warm hands in her own squeeze slightly. 

“Yes, yes, I’m...’m fine,” she shakes her head, and pats her hands on Minfilia’s gently, “Some memories are just terrible. And sometimes... sometimes you are terrible, when you live to look in hindsight. Always a bitter thing to swallow.”

“I’m sorry I brought up such...painful memories. I didn’t mean to, I just...Thancred doesn’t talk about her at all, and Urianger is so sad about it, but you... you always say you’ll tell me whatever it is I want to know.” The girl seems startled at her own forcefulness, a blush of anxious pink on her delicate features. 

“Truly, ‘tis no fault you’ve caused, Filia, I...you have right to know. And I should tell. I shall, tell.” She corrects herself softly, brushing a bit of hair out of the girl’s face before worrying her bottom lip under her teeth, considering how honesty would take form.

“I told you I’d ne’er keep a thing from you, and I’ll not start with this. What...what do you want to know first?”

Minfilia pauses, seeming to weigh the question, and Ylde watches the too-bright sunlight glint off of the girl’s cornsilk blonde hair. It doesn’t quite suit her, she thinks quietly, but she can’t parse why. It’s just too light. Too much not her own.

“How did you meet her? I know Thancred says you were a hero, and there was something about a primal, but...” the girl frowns, but keeps her sapphire eyes trained oh Ylde's face, watching for any change in expression. The Viera grants a small, tired smile, before shrugging and looking past the girl to the walls of her Crystarium room, their unfamiliar warmth. 

“I met her in the worst week of my life. Well, not quite, but...close. I was so new to Ul’dah, and while I had met Thancred, I knew very few people outside the thaumaturge guild. I was painfully lonely, and...angry with the world. Angrier still that I was being dragged into forces beyond my knowing. And she was there, and she was like me, but...” the breath she takes is steadying, but does little to quell the bitterness of guilt. 

“I was so angry with her. Angry that she thought it was a blessing. Angry that she would send me out to battle horrible things and sit behind that desk. Angry that she knew well enough how it felt, but she’d send my boys and I...I was so angry back then, at my fate, and I didn’t have anywhere to put it. I directed it at her, only in my mind, only in silence, and...she didn’t deserve that. She was a kind girl. Much too young and much too brave.”

Minfilia looks startled, but strangely... unsurprised. As if she’d already seen the remnants of the burnt out cinders in Ylde’s chest, and simply caught sight of the match at long last. 

“But she was so...familiar. Always there, always kind and hopeful. I stopped hating her after a while, but I didn’t like her, like I should have. I wasn’t a very kind person in the beginning.” The honesty tastes bitter, but it’s what she promised. Minfilia doesn’t interrupt her, doesn’t press. She waits, though. 

“She told me to go in those tunnels, and I knew something was wrong, and I left her, because I was scared and angry. And what became of her...what paved the way for you, it happened. And it wasn’t fair.”

“She didn’t want to go? She didn’t want what happened?” Minfilia asks quietly, and a tiny hand curls gently against her soft white dress. 

“I don’t know,” Ylde answers as honestly as she can, patting the girl’s head softly, “I think she was scared, but she was also brave. What she did was a miracle. It was a saving grace. But that doesn’t make it kind."

“You, Filia, you...you’re a blessing. You’re not to blame, the same that Minfilia wasn’t to blame. That you exist is no crime, and all the tragedy that led to it is not yours to bear. Life wasn’t fair to her, and it is not fair to you, but you don’t...”

She stops herself before she says what she wants to. Before she pleads with the girl not to be rash. Not to give into what she thought needed to happen. Not to give up life before it starts out of misplaced duty. 

“Thank you,” Minfilia says instead, with a nod that says she knows, she knows, “For telling me the truth. I think...I think maybe I’m lucky. That you seem to like me.”

“I do, very much so.” Ylde nods. 

“It’s sad that she didn’t get to feel the same, but I think...I think maybe she understood? I think I would, and we aren’t the same, but...maybe.”

Ylde looks quite taken aback at this, watching the young girl’s eyebrows twist into thought. She’d never considered it. She’d long thought that she would never be absolved of her quiet cruelty. And maybe she still wasn’t, but the mere idea...was so strange. So new. 

“I don’t know. I hope she knew it wasn’t her fault. And I wish, sometimes, that I could tell her as much. But I can’t. I can only... be better. I’ve tried to be.” 

This seems to satisfy her, somewhat. Not all the way and yet enough. Minfilia settles, and Ylde’s hands resume their work, twisting strands of hair into a soft braid.   
It is not many moments before there is something else. Another strange air, that makes the girl in front of her sigh. 

“Yes, Filia?” Ylde manages, curiously. 

“He loves you.” Minfilia doesn’t have to say who ‘he’ is. They both know well enough. 

“I know,” she sighs, and brushes back the hair from her eyes, watching the sun set on Lakeland from the window, casting them both in golden red hues, “I know. I love him too.” 

“But you’re mad at him?” Minfilia queries, again, tilting her head. The braid that Ylde is winding into a crown around the girl’s head shifts, and almost collapses into nothing, the hair too fine and golden to hold on its own. Only the fact she still holds it retains its shape. 

“I am, very much so.”

“I think he knows. I think it hurts him. He doesn’t say, but...” she shuffles, pulling her knees up to her chest and curling in. Her entire form fits perfectly in between Ylde’s crossed legs, and she smiles, continuing her braiding. She thinks it might soothe the girl somehow, being held so carefully. She hopes it does. 

“He wouldn’t. He’s always been like this. And yet, I love him still.” She shrugs, winding the ribbon through golden hair. And it’s true. She does love him. She might always. It didn’t make it any easier. 

“...He’d tell me about you. Not always, but sometimes. I think he wanted to remember you, to keep you close, even if you weren’t.” 

This is a shock. Ylde’s ears stand to attention, and she eyes the young girl in her lap with a startled frown. 

“D-did he, now?” She manages with a stutter. The braid she works on slips again, tumbles into nothingness. Minfilia nods, and leans back, a weight upon Ylde’s chest, to look up at her. 

“He never said that you were...together, but I figured it out. It wasn’t hard, he was...I don’t know. Not happier, not sadder, but...more? When he talked about you. It wasn’t the same as when he talked about Khiiral or M’oe. And Orrick, the way he talked about you...” 

Ylde pauses for a moment, to consider this. 

“I’m sorry.” She decides on, finally. 

“Why?” Minfilia’s tone is full of confusion. 

“For whatever expectation they've built that I will inevitably fail to fulfill, I think?,” she sighs, and ties off another braid with a ribbon, pressing a preserved flower pin into it and pulling it in with the rest, “I don’t know what Thancred told you, of course, but he was always a bit dramatic.” 

Minfilia stirs, and seems to laugh, quietly at first, and then much more, perhaps the loudest Ylde has ever witnessed her. 

“Is that so funny?” She grins, a chuckle building in her own throat. 

“It’s just...he is very dramatic. And you’re just like he said.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, frankly.” She smiles, and startles at a cough from the doorway. 

“It is a good thing, in my opinion.” Thancred says, carefully and without the swagger she’d so loved. 

“Speak of the devil, hm?” She says softly, alerting Minfilia to the form of Thancred Waters leaning on the doorframe, looking both perplexed and oddly...relieved. 

“I’m hardly that bad.” He calls, but it lacks the punch it might have once had. He is so different now, so tired...bitter. Half-broken. 

“Of course not,” Ylde smirks, and ties off the last of the braids, pulling them together into an intricate weave that hangs over Minfilia’s pale shoulder, “Your timing is impeccable. I’ve just finished.”

Minfilia’s shoulders slump near in disappointment, before Ylde leans forward and hugs them tightly for a moment, placing a kiss gently on the girl’s forehead. She beams, then, startled but delighted, before looking back at Thancred. Ylde follows her gaze to see the man’s features wage war between softening so damnably it ached into her chest, and trying to hold himself steady at the sight. 

“I’ve...I’ve come to take Minfilia back, for dinner and then bed. I didn’t mean to interrupt.” His hands are raised in a sheepish way that doesn’t quite reflect into the sad warmth of his eyes. 

When Ylde stands, holding out hands to pull up Minfilia with her, she grants him a tight-lipped smile. 

“Of course. Would it be acceptable if I accompanied you for that dinner? I must say I’d forgotten the time, and I would appreciate it.”

“Please?” Minfilia asks with wide eyes. 

“I...I wouldn’t want to bother you,” Thancred frowns, looking uncertain, “But I can’t say I would ever begrudge your company.”

Minfilia beams, holding tightly to Ylde’s hand as she heads towards the door. 

“Oh, a moment, Filia?” Ylde manages with a laugh, loosening her fingers, “Meet us at the Stairs, if you would? Tell them I’ve sent you ahead.” 

The girl looks perplexed, and a bit disappointed as she nods, but wanders off down the corridor nonetheless, leaving Thancred and Ylde standing silently.

“If she...if she interrupted you, I am sorry. She knew you were resting, but-“

“She didn’t interrupt, and I was happy to see her.” Ylde frowns at him. 

“Ah.” He doesn’t seem to know what to say, chastened by her tone. 

“Thancred,” she sighs, and pushes her fingers up under his chin, tilting it towards her, “She’s a child, and a sweet one at that. I care for her, and enjoyed her visit.”

His eyes widen, and the guilt that rushes through them is unmistakable. As is the surprise when she leans down, presses her lips to his quickly, and softly, before pulling away. 

“Ylde, I...“

“Still angry with you,” she reminds, as she turns to follow the hall out of the Pendants, “But it seemed a good time to remind you that I loved you, dearly, damnably, and hold out hope that one day soon you’ll remember yourself.” 

She leaves him staring after her with shock on his face, and goes to her dinner without another thought.


End file.
